Robots Aren't Coming For Your Job. They're Already Here

But let me tell you something. The robots aren't coming to take our jobs. They're already here. This is game plan. I am Sam Grobert. I'm a writer at Bloomberg Business Week magazine. I am joined here by We're back in Greenfield. I'm a reporter at Bloomberg where I cover the workplace, and today we're going to talk about automation and what it means for all of us at work today, tomorrow, and even beyond them. So, Becca, you've written a story about this topic. Do you want to tell our dear

listeners a little bit about what you found. Yeah, So, automation has been in the news recently because of our President elect Donald Trump saying that he is going to keep factory work here in the US and brokering that dear deal with Carrier a plant in Indiana, that BLOCKBUSTERR deal, Yes, saving a round a thousand jobs human jobs. This brought

up a conversation about automation. I know that as a reader of business news, there are so many articles about the robots are coming for your jobs, but I tend to gloss over them because a lot of them are just basically saying that and little else. Yeah, it's exactly,

it's not very relatable. But now in this case, people are pointing out that often the jobs that have been lost in the manufacturing industry aren't being replaced by cheaper laborers in Mexico or China, but much cheaper robots who are much more productive and do a lot of the work that human used to do. So there are kind of some startling statistics about this. If I may, oh,

you may, indeed, I want to hear them. So America has lost more than seven million factory jobs since manufacturing employment peaked in nineteen seventy nine, but we now produce far more. We've more than doubled our production in the same time span. Right, so making more stuff with fewer people. Right, So America is the second biggest manufacturing producer in the

world after China. And another study that came out last year found that trade, which is the big Donald Trump talking point, accounted for about of America's lost factory jobs, which is you know, has been accelerated in the last decade and people really do feel that, and obviously that's why his message did resonate with so many people. But of those jobs were taken by robots. And if you even think about it, there was a story out in the l A Times by our former colleague Natalie at

Drop who wrote about warehouse jobs. So warehouse jobs have brought a lot of human jobs to the US, but robots are quickly taking a lot of that work. I remember a few years ago Amazon had this Kiva robot, right, I've seen the Kiva robot in action. Actually, I was in Devon's, Massachusetts once at a company called Quiet Logistics, which has the Kiva robots themselves. In the way that the warehouse was organized is there was one zone for the humans and then there was another zone that you

didn't go into for the robots. Because the robots are moving around rather quickly and they're carrying very heavy things, and so it wouldn't be very safe to go into the robot zone. But the idea was that there was a bit of a division of labor there. The robots would go and retrieve items from way back in the warehouse, you know, an eighth of a mile away, and bring them to a human who could then box it, packaging label something a robot is not as good at yet,

not yet yet, that's the word. That's what my story is about. It's about manufacturing in jobs that we can see robots doing. But robots are coming, as you mentioned, for other jobs that we never really thought about already. Already there are robots replacing financial analysts, for example, and these are robots more in the digital sense. They're not physical robots, but they are bots in manipulating data. Yeah, and so what are we going to do when all

those people are mad about their jobs being gone? Or what will their jobs look like are they're going to be gone? Those are some of the questions that I've had, and then I try to answer in the story. Well, I do suggest that everybody go and read that story. But while you're listening here, we are going to be joined by someone who can help answer those questions right here in your headphones. We are joined here by Professor David Demming from Harvard's Graduate School of Education. Hi David,

Hi Sam, how are you great? Thank you. I was wondering, as we're talking here about the role of robots and labor and how we feel about them coming to take our jobs and so forth, could you possibly give us a brief description of the current state of the art of robotics in the workplace, Like where are they most prevalent, what are they doing well, what can't they do well yet, and what needs to happen for that to change? Sure? So, I mean, I think robotics are pretty prevalent in the workplace,

but mostly in manufacturing. So um. One of the things that's been in the news a lot recently is the decline of manufacturing jobs. And so you might think that manufacturing itself is in decline, but actually that's not true. Manufacturing output has continued to grow. This is actually sort of a boom time for manufacturing output. It's just that it's robots doing the job instead of humans. Robots are

also prevalent in other sectors of the economy. But the thing that robots and machines and computers really still can't do very well at all is socially interact with people or with each other. Alright, So so social reaction just means the non routine, hard to script out process of having a conversation with another human being, figuring out if you and I are going to work together on a team, what are you going to do? What am I going

to do? Being flexible, being empathetic. That's something that at least right now, we still don't have a good way to program to automate, and I definitely want to get to that. But there's this paper that you site, and I've seen a lot about how cent of total US employment is at high risk of automation over the next one to two decades. So you're saying manufacturing work has already been gutted. Basically, what is the next frontier of automation.

That's a great question. I mean, I guess it's really hard to predict the future. But I think one of the reasons why you see a lot of um newspaper articles that I would call our other people also would call automation anxiety kind of pieces, it's because you see automation increasingly UM grabbing onto what we might think of is white color or professional work. So one example is ecovery in the legal world. If you're if you're an attorney or you have friend who attorneys already know about this.

This is you used to be an attorney's job to comb through reams of paper looking for bits of information that might be relevant to a case or to a deposition. Now we've got software to do that, and so that's kind of been really great for UM for legal work. It's made legal work much more productive, but it's putting lawyers out of work. And you see some of that with automation of maybe you guys know this short kind of newspaper articles. Fact based articles are being automated, are

automatically produced recaps of sports games, things like that. And so when you start to see that happen, those are the types of changes that are affecting the people that we all know, people that journalists know, And so I think you see a lot more articles about it. But I think, in fact, the progress of automation has been

pretty continuous over the past several decades. David. When I think of manufacturing robots, I I suppose, like many people imagine those big sort of arms in a say auto plant, right, kind of assembling a car body. Um, those have been around for some decades now in one form or another. What kinds of robots are being built or will be built that can work presumably alongside humans? What? What? What

do they start to look like? Yeah? Exactly. So when you when you think of robots in your mind, you have this image, at least I do, growing up in the in the eighties. I think of like the Transformers, right, stuff like that. But actually, automation is not just robots, is any process that can be scripted out in advance.

And so you know, you don't think of things like I don't know, Siri or basically um computer programs that can like maybe customer service, like if you call a company and you want to get help with your credit card, your credit card gets stolen or you want to call and complain. You don't think of the voice on the other end that's not a human as being a robot. But that's actually the same manifestation of robotics, meaning scripting out what used to be human performance in a predictable way.

So I think that's been going on for a long time. Those things are also robots in some sense, and you're going to see more of that, robots being more and more human like. One of the more modern expressions of that are these messenger based bots. Yes, you can chat bots that you can like say I want to flight to Florida, and it'll be like, I see that you want to flight to Florida. These are your options. I'll take that one. And then it makes a joke about

Florida or something. Right. Yeah, they're path yeah, they they're getting picked here all the time. And that's the thing that's kind of the at least of my understanding the frontier is we're getting better at natural language processing. You think about think about Sirie. Okay. I don't know how much you guys, you Siri, but you have to say things in a certain way to Siri to get the kind of response. Otherwise you get the you know, searching the web for right. Yeah, and that's Sirie being not

understanding natural language. Right. So I'll give you an example. Um, my children, maybe as many children do, love to play with my phone and with Siri, and so they were asking Siri, Sirie, what color is my water bottle? Okay, which Siri could actually has the technology to figure that out. Siri could turn its camera into the water bottle and say your water bottles red. But series you stupid to figure that out? So Siri says, searching on the web

for what color is my water bottle? But if you ask Siri, what's thirty seven times fifty nine, as I encourage my daughter to do, Syria can do that right away. So I said to her, why do you think, Siri? Can you know this is a cognitive process. It's really most people can't just do thirty seven times fifty nine in their head. Syria can do it instantaneously. And that's because the problem space is defined. You have a database where you say, these are all the multiplications. You know,

do this, and Syrie can do that really quickly. But common sense tasks like telling you what color your water bottle is, which are very simple and natural for humans to do, is really hard. Actually, a program up happens when the power and potential of every employee and leader in your workforce is released, and corn Ferry can get you there by aligning your people to your strategy, attracting, developing, engaging, and rewarding them to reach new heights with corn Ferry.

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dot com slash up. So all of us talk about robots taking our jobs is scary, but I found some comfort in your working paper the growing importance of social skills in the labor market, probably as somebody who uses social skills in her job a lot, but you found that there are some skills that are going to be valued in the labor market because robots can't do them. So can you talk about that and maybe what kinds

of jobs are the safest? Sure? So, the way you want to think about how technological progress affects the labor market is that there's really two things going on, and we tend to focus on one of them, which is how technology takes away jobs what economists would say substitutes away for for human labor. So you've got robots or computers substituting away for human labor, and that's the scary side. But there's a friendly side too, and that is it

also makes people who aren't substituted away much more productive. Right, So, for example, you used to have to do complex mathematical calculations by hand. You might hire an accountant to do this. Let's say you own a small business. Now you've got tools like Microsoft Excel that allow that process to be automated and very quick and very customizable. Right, so we focus on the putting the account and out of business, but the other side of it, if you make business

decisions for a living, you're much more productive. So the lesson that we've learned from the study of how technological change affects labor markets is that anything that is not directly replaced by technology is generally complimented by it, which is an economist way of saying makes you more productive. So you have to look at the labor market and say, what are the things that technology still can't do very well?

And those things, those tasks, those job tasks are going to be made more productive and thus going to be more important. And that's kind of the thesis of the paper, which is that, look, at least right now, we don't know about the future, but right now, machines can't have an unscripted conversation within a human being or with each other in any kind of meaningful way. They can't socially interact,

they can't work on a team, they're very inflexible. And so people who can do that are going to be more valuable in the workplace than they were before because we've got technology to do all the other things you want to hear a really left field example of what you're talking about. Okay, So I was done in Florida last year at Florida Atlantic University, and there's a team of engineers who are developing these um robot boats, basically

water based drones that can inspect bridge pilings underwater. And this was a job that people used to have to do themselves. They had to go underwater with a diving rig and it was actually pretty dangerous and it took a really long time, and you can only send out, you know, one person at a time. And now what they're doing is the robots are going around and constantly just floating around these bridges and looking at them underwater

with their cameras. The people who used to have to go into the water stay on land at a place where they're watching what the robots are looking at and making decisions about, oh, now we have to go fix that. So their job is safer, and they actually get to cover more territory because the robots don't ever stop work. You have to ask yourself. The U is a great example. You ask the question, why don't we automate the final step, which is telling the you know, telling the robots what

to do once they get there. It's because it's unpredictable, right, and so people are just very easily and naturally able to say, oh, look, I see the problem, let's do this instead. But if you're going to write a kind of a script or a computer program to do that, you have to be able to anticipate anything that might possibly happen. And some situations are really uncertain, and people are still much better than machines at reacting to uncertainty.

So these skills, I've seen them called a couple of things like empathy, labor, non cognitive skills, social skills, social labor. They also are happening in high skilled labor. I now we're talking a lot about manufacturing and transportation. Do you think that our education system is pushing these enough? Are we teaching this well enough? Are these are this? Is

this valued enough? Because I get a sense I'm just going to say that it's not because we're hearing so much about the push for STEM, and you know how everybody needs to be a coder and learned to code, but you never hear people raising their hand for learn to be more empathetic. It's a great question, um, and I'm glad you brought up STEM because it does tie into that. You do see a lot of discussion of you know, we need more STEM jobs, and I think

that is not untrue. The way I would say it is that you want people to have technical skills because they need to understand how the machines work and how things are happening under the hood, so to speak. But you also want them to have these social skills. It's just not enough to have one and not the other.

I would predict, for example, that twenty years from now, you'll see many fewer jobs where you just write software code all day, but you'll see a lot more jobs where you have to do something like that as part

of many other things you do on the job. So I think the workplace is just becoming more integrated in terms of which task keep to do in and less predictable in part because of this change that anything that's predictable and and and can be scripted, we can automate, and so you need people to be able to um flexibly rotate between many different things in a kind of unpredictable way. And so I talked about this in the paper.

I mean there's a kind of way to formalize this, but essentially it's like, look, if you don't have any technical skills, you don't know how to do anything, then the fact that you're you have good social skills is not that useful actually, because there are a lot of people who can do that. There are a lot of people who can who can empathize with others. But what there aren't a lot of people who can do is people who have the technical skills who understand how everything

is working. But also those people kind of tend to be people, tend to be one or the other. And so I think what you see very clearly in the data, and what I talked about in the paper is that you see increasing labor market returns for people who have both types of skills what kondom is often called cognitive skills or hard skills and soft skills or social skills. I wouldn't be doing my job as a business journalist if I didn't refer to Steve Jobs probably one severy

week or so. But what you're talking about really reminds me of one of his keynotes where he said that the key to his success or Apple's success was the marriage of technology and the liberal arts. That it couldn't just be numbers and engineering, but it also had to have the inspiration and the artistic and cultural influences of literature and music and all these other things. And so the two brought together is what really makes for interesting products,

interesting workers, and so forth. Uh, you can't just have the one. I think that's right, and I think what he's really talking about is the marrying of human creativity with all the things that are possible with technology. You know, you can't just if you're just training yourself, or we're training students in schools to just be like the machines, then we're not gonna be able to make full use of these technological advances. It's really putting the two together

that's so important. David, thank you so much. This has been a really eye opening conversation. Really appreciate it, my pleasure. It's great to talk to you guys. So David scared us obviously because the robots are coming for all the jobs. He even mentioned journalism right. One thing that we didn't get to talk to him about that I thought was interesting that he and I had talked about when I talked to him for my story was about the gender

component in all of this. Manufacturing obviously tends to be a very male dominated field, and a lot of empathy jobs that are really growing in this country tend to be female dominated jobs like nursing, home health AIDS, physical therapists, teaching, and these are skills that he's saying are going to be valued more and more. But I do wonder a lot of them aren't very well paid now, and you still don't see a lot of men going into nursing, even though it's a high growth field that does pay well.

I'm wondering how that will change, and if more men do go into these fields, that they will become higher paying, because that has happened historically. Once men go into a field, it tends to be more like we need some more money here. This is ridiculous. Which happened with computer programming

is one big example. But I remember there was a study that I cite that talks about um how janitors make a lot more than house cleaners, for example, or HR people tend to be female, men make less than someone with a similar skill set in the office, things that don't make sense at all except for gender. It is interesting when you think about sort of the progression

of automation that it occurs across different categories. So we start with blue collar jobs, and then it moves to white collar jobs, and then people like us in the media start to get really scared because we go, oh, wait, it's for me, which just proves the sort of bias that's in the implicit in all of that. But then there's also the gender. So it's like blue collar jobs,

which often have been male dominated jobs. So it'll be I don't know, the next fifty years will be Yeah, we'll see if quote unquote pink collar jobs stay pink color or will that become more prestige work right, and just the jobs that everybody needs and wants to have,

because they're the ones that actually are left. I was talk to a lot of people who said managers are going to be more valued in the future because managers tend to have to work with people, promote cross teams, and again, those are skills that are tend to be associated with women. I guess I should go be a manager. I know it's sorry everyone, I know nobody. Nobody wants

to hear that like that idea at all. Anyway, if you don't want to row about to take your job, get some social skills, I would have to say that. But I do love that we're standing up for social skills. I have relied on social skills more than intelligence or talent for about twenty years now. So if that's the way the future is going, I am well set for it, all right. And now it's time for half bake takes. Half fake takes. Half bake takes are not fully formed thoughts, ideas,

opinions that Becca and I have had and discussed. Becca, do you want to lead us off with your half bake take? So my half big take I think will be controversial. Good. This morning I had a really horrible subway commute where the four train that I take was just crawling, got stuck with so slow it was crowded, I had to stand in a weird position. My back

hurt terrible. Generally subway commuting is better than driving community, but I think getting stuck on a slow train where you think the worst thing is happening is on par with being stuck in traffic while driving. It's really bad. And being stuck in traffic totally terrible. It happens more often if you're a driving community, But being stuck on that train it's not. I know, you get to read and stuff, but you run out of reading material and it's like you don't have any personal space. I'm going

to disagree, kind of disagree with you here. Also, I don't take a fancy train to work where you get a seat right, No, no, no, agreed. But here's the thing about getting stuck in traffic. When you're in a car and you and you're driving, right, it's exhausting. No, it is because you actually have to pay attention. I know, I know, but I just there is. It's I think generally subway communing is better, I really do. But this running was really rough and I think as bad as

my old traffic. You know what, you know what I'm going to do the thing that I think. I'm sorry you had a bad community. Thank you. That's the important thing here is your half baked take. Well, my half baked take is also kind of travel related, mobility related. Um ladies and gentlemen, if you are out there and you have not signed up for t S A pre Check or Global Entry, you are playing yourselves. This is

like the best thing that's happened. Okay, you recently just got it because my credit card paid for it, and it is really amazing. You can get to the airport so late and you get to go through so quickly. One thing I would say is that you know, we have some t S A pre check privilege. Not everybody can afford it or also we'll get approved. Maybe not gonna. I gotta say, as far as the affordability is concerned, if you do any traveling at all, I think it's

what like for five years. Okay, yeah, it's I guess if you're buying a plane ticket, you can probably afford it. But not everyone gets approved. And I was felt kind of weird giving my fingerprints to the government. Right. Um, there is t S A pre Check which works domestically. Global Entry is another program that allows you also to skip the line when you're returning from a foreign country at immigration, um and includes pre check. I think it's

like twenty more so it's actually the better deal. You know, maybe I should have done that. Uh. The t s A itself is really interested in getting as many people to sign up as possible because it produces the standard line at their already overtax security checkpoints. And so they've actually been setting up sort of temporary or mobile registration sites. I do suggest you go online see if there's one

near you, make the time to go over there. It's like flying in nineteen, like seven again, you just kind of like, oh, yeah, here's a metal detector. I'm breezing through. That's a reason to do it. You don't have to go through the rapist scan machines. So that's what they're called. Okay, and this has been half break takes, half baked takes. Thank you for listening, and thank you again to Professor David Demming from Harvard School of Graduate Education. You've been

listening to game Plan. Game Plan is produced by Liz Smith and Magnus Hendrickson. The head of Bloomberg Podcast is Alec McCabe. If you like the show, head on over to iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts and rate and review and subscribe. We read the reviews, and if you want to reach out to us directly, we are always on Twitter, always eager to get your messages. I am at sam grow Part and I'm at ours Greenfield.

Thanks for listening. Catch you next week. Hi. Get the most from your people and send your business soaring with corn Ferry. From executive search to talent strategy, leadership development, rewards and succession planning. Corn Ferry knows up is more than a direction, it's your future. Learn more at corn ferry dot com slash up. You know that I have a robot named after me? Really, it's the grow Bot. The grow Bot, It's a robot that they sire about. Named back at green pot